A mistreated maid? Or a profound insult?

In New York, it looked like a straightforward case: an obscure young diplomat at the Indian consulate was accused of lying on visa forms so she could bring her maid to the U.S., paying her less than $3 an hour. The diplomat was arrested, processed through the legal system like anyone else and quickly freed on bail.

In India, though, the hours that Devyani Khobragade spent in custody have set off a diplomatic storm. Government officials roared about her public arrest, particularly her strip search. Cabinet ministers warned of international conspiracies. An Indian official compared the search to a gang rape. Heavy concrete security barriers were dragged by police from around the U.S. Embassy. The Indian media fumed over the country's humiliation.

Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid summed up the feelings of many people here. "It is no longer about an individual," he told Parliament in an angry speech Wednesday. "It is about our sense of self as a nation and our place in the world."

Because what happened in New York was not just about an arrest, or about one young woman. Instead, the incident pinballed through a series of cultural land mines, causing an uproar in a country where a woman's honor is supposed to be publicly defended, insults are profoundly felt and the treatment of one's maid is, for most, considered no business at all of the authorities.

As for the arrest itself: Only the powerless and poor would face arrest for lying on a government form. For someone in the educated elite, a strip search would be unthinkable.

"There's an expectation here that if you speak English in a certain way you will be treated with a certain deference by the authorities," said Mihir Sharma, a New Delhi writer and associate editor of the Business Standard newspaper.

It's an expectation that means police rarely harass drivers of Mercedes, and wealthy Indians convicted of brutal crimes can spend years free on medical leave.

Then there's history. The arrest mingled with long-harbored worries that the U.S. condescends to India, treating it as a poverty-wracked nation with poor sanitation instead of as the world's largest democracy and a nuclear power. Also, while New Delhi and Washington have become close allies over the past decade, that followed many more years of Cold War distrust, when India had close ties to the Soviet Union, the United States had close ties to Pakistan and the U.S. Embassy here was regarded as little more than a walled CIA encampment.

Among the Indian elite, and particularly among senior foreign service officers, it's not hard to find people who still look at the United States with deep-rooted suspicion.

"For (so) long these Americans ... have taken us for granted, and we loved to surrender every time they insulted us, interfered in our affairs and humiliated our citizens," Tarun Vijay, a Hindu nationalist and member of the upper house of Parliament, wrote in the Times of India. "Our ministers are subjected to humiliating searches and we kept quiet."

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A mistreated maid? Or a profound insult?